NWB2023_The SDGs and publications of University of Helsinki: tracking contributions responsibly

The United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development launched in 2015 introduced 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Ever since then, Universities have been interested in evaluating how their research relates to these goals. In University of Helsinki, for example, we are developing ways of monitoring and analysing the share of publications related to sustainable development. Several analytical tools for tracking SDG contributions have cropped up in recent years. Major citation databases such as Scopus, Web of Science and Dimensions now come with SDG-information. However, SDGs are very general in scope and consequently their interpretation at the level of publications can often be ambiguous. Major databases tend to use different methods for relating publications under various SDGs. For example, SciVal uses AI enhanced keyword searches whereas InCites uses citation-based clusters (Citation Topics). We wanted to find out how these differences in methodology are reflected in the resulting SDG distributions for our university. We gathered all peer-reviewed University of Helsinki publications between the years 2020-2022 with a DOI-identifier (22563 publications in total) and analysed their SDG distributions in InCites and SciVal. We compared the distributions and looked at their overlaps.The results were that there were significant differences in SDG attributions with up to quadruple amounts of publications for certain SDGs depending on the database used. More problematic, however, was that the overlaps in publications tended to be very small (4.7% to 37.5% for InCites in SciVal and 5.5% to 80.3% for SciVal in InCites). Some implications were considered.